Trip to Sweden

Last week I had a memorable trip to the Swedish Weaving Exhibition . This event is run by the publishers of the weaving magazine Våv and takes place every three years. This year it was in the town of Borås in Western Sweden.
I flew from Edinburgh to Copenhagen in Denmark where I was met by my friend, Ellen Turner. The next day we met up with a coach trip going to the exhibition. Ellen's sister-in -law Karin also joined us on this trip.
We crossed by ferry from Denmark to Sweden at Helsingør, a short trip of about 30 minutes. Shortly after that we stopped at Båstad to visit the Marta Maas-Fjetterstrøm Studio and Exhibition

We saw beautifully coloured carpets and examples of tapestry weaving. An enormous yarn store with 8 tons of yarn in every shade you could imagine. Here is a picture of a loom with a traditionally designed carpet in progress...............

The Scandic Plaza Hotel in Borås was our 'home' for three nights. The coach collected us on Friday morning and took us to the exhibition hall where more than 70 stall holders were ready and waiting.

There was so much to see and I really enjoyed the examples of Scandinavian designs on show on the various stands. The colours were inspirational and hopefully my large collection of pictures and catalogues will help me in the months to come ! Here are just a couple of examples........

There was plenty of cotton and linen on sale and both were on my shopping list ! I made several visits to the Venne stand as they had such a wide selection of colours and some very interesting scarf kits in very fine cotton. Here is how a small part of their stand looked.........

and here is the picture on the front of one of the scarf kits I bought.................

We spent all day at the exhibition and went back to the Hotel laden with parcels at the end of it !

On Saturday morning we spent an enjoyable time at the Textile Museum. On display were the garments in the Våv and Handwoven competition. It was very nice to see the items close up and appreciate the hard work that had gone into producing them. I particularly liked the colours in this jacket.....................

The ground floor of the museum housed a varied collection of cotton spinning machinery, damask looms and circular knitting machines. Upstairs though, we were treated to an extensive collection of specimen pieces of weaving.

A beautiful damask tablecloth caught my eye.......

Loads of other lovely items, too many to post but here are a couple of things..............

I am very fond of the classic Dråll design and I saw so many variations of it !

In the afternoon we returned to the exhibition to  make our final purchases. I had decided I would like to make some Christmas place mats in a rep weave design I had seen on one of the stands.

That made quite a big parcel ! I bought quite a few books, all in Swedish but with help from Ellen and Karin I think I can just about make sense of the instructions for the various projects. I particularly liked the books produced by the Våv magazine people with projects from their previous magazines. They had one book published for the exhibition and all the projects were made up and on display on their stand.

One of the tea towel projects in this book looked like this..................

I purchased a good supply of 16/2 cotton, I only show one spool of natural but in fact there were four ! 

and linen also !

I probably have enough yarn now to keep me going for some considerable time and certainly enough pattern ideas for the rest of my days !!!

We left Borås on Sunday morning and headed back towards Denmark but two stops on the way. The first was to visit a commercial linen weaving factory shop called Ekelund . Beautiful table linens on display here and for sale ! A lot of photographs taken of the classic designs like this one................

One last stop to make and that was to visit a tapestry weaver called Inga Torselius. She is in her eighties and an active weaver. She had invited the whole bus load, all 64 of us to take coffee, cake and biscuits with her in her holiday house ! When we arrived I wondered how we would all fit in as the house looked tiny.........

However, once inside it opened up into a beautiful house absolutely filled with Inga's beautiful weaving. She is particularly well known for her tapestry weaving and here are a few pictures of the ones we saw...............

The coach headed for the ferry back to Denmark and the end of our trip. I know this has been a long post but I have only given you a taster of the things we saw, there was so much more ! It was a wonderful experience and my thanks to Ellen and Karin for inviting me to join them. I was in good hands and had a great time. Over the long winter ahead of us I am sure my mind will go back to the days of this trip and remember the fun and laughter we shared. That's while I am weaving all those cotton and linen tea towels !!

Hope you have enjoyed sharing the trip with me !